NEVER NO MORE

For those who like Irish literature, in all its exaggeration, color, charm, sentiment, here is a book which as O'Faolain puts it has ""beauty, nostalgia, sentimentality...wisdom, heartache, excess..."" And more, for it has an appealing ingenuousness and susceptibility in its picture of a child who loved all the homely details of her life in rural Ireland. There is no plot. It is just her rearing by Gran, a ""withered little apple of a woman"", fond and sage. There are tinkers and turf-cutters, there's the death of the baby brother, there's the new bicycle, and convent schooling in Gran's unsuccessful attempt to make a school teacher of her, and finally there's the death of Gran. The market might be somewhat that of L.A.G. Strong's early The Garden.